This paper argues for the coherence and relevance of themes in the revenge tragedy Hoffman (c. 1602) by the early modern English playwright Henry Chettle, one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known contemporaries. The play was marginalized for a long time even within the canon of English-speaking countries, and it is very rarely studied in general: for centuries, it has been more convenient to assign it to the group of „decadent” plays signalling the decline of Elizabethan drama. I contend that the play proves to be more than cheap sensationalism if we read it in the light of the contemporary anatomizing habits of the mind, the general early modern inwardness which gave rise to the advent of the homo clausus, the new type of subjectivity. Anatomy and public anatomy theatres attracted almost as much attention as public playhouses in Renaissance England, and the anatomical perspective in Hoffman, examined within the semiotic space of the predramatic emblematic theatre, reveals how the revenge tragedy thematizes the clash of two competing epistemologies, a clash that bears witness to the birth of early modern subjectivity.